First live interview part of propaganda campaign to win support for imminent return of Snooper's Charter.

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In the first live interview ever given by a senior British intelligence official, the Director General of MI5, Andrew Parker, said Internet and phone companies had an "ethical responsibility" to help spy on everyone, even though many would consider that rather unethical. According to The Guardian, he invoked the usual "terrorists" and "paedophiles" to justify turning online services into part of the UK surveillance machine. Parker also said he wanted "up-to-date" spying powers, by which he presumably meant more of them, although he modestly noted: “It is completely for ministers to propose, and parliament to decide. It’s a fundamental point about what MI5 is. It’s for us to follow what’s set by parliament, and that’s what we do.”

Parker may want "up-to-date" powers, but his organisation's vocabulary seems stuck in the 1990s. In a statement released after the BBC Radio 4 interview, MI5 wrote: "Technology is bringing great benefits to society and making our lives easier. But now so much of people’s lives are conducted online, MI5 needs the tools to be able to follow terrorists in cyberspace as much as when they are walking down the street." Modern spies obviously feel they need to keep a close eye on GeoCities and MySpace.

MI5 also seems confused about what exactly it is doing. The Guardian writes that Parker "insisted MI5, which deals with domestic threats, and its partners, MI6, which deals with overseas intelligence-gathering, and the main listening agency, GCHQ, were not engaging in browsing through the private communications of the population as a whole but was targeted." And yet the MI5 statement declares: "Checking through large amounts of data is very often the only, and most crucial means MI5 has to track down terrorists who are plotting to cause harm to the UK."

Further Reading

MI5 and friends checking through large amounts of data of those who might be considered real suspects, subject to strict judicial oversight, seems justifiable. But routinely trawling through the entire UK Internet feed, as is evidently happening with the Tempora programme, is something quite different, and can hardly be called "targeted"—unless the entire UK population are suspects these days.

Judging by the imminent "Snooper's Charter," which will spy on everyone's communications all the time, that does indeed seem to be the case. The Guardian noted that today's unprecedented radio interview came just a day after the home secretary, Theresa May, "summoned the biggest US internet providers and British phone companies to a meeting on Tuesday to seek their support for her new 'snooper’s charter' surveillance bill." Despite deep public concern, this is likely to call for a wide-ranging set of phone and Internet metadata, such as detailed Web browsing histories, to be retained for 12 months, and made available on demand to the authorities.

According to The Guardian, the Snooper's Charter would also require all online companies—including those based abroad like Facebook and Google—to give the police and security services access to bulk data held on their users. That's presumably another aspect of what Parker had in mind when he asked for "up-to-date" surveillance powers: the ability to check instantly what you were up to in that terrorist and paedophile den known as "cyberspace."